GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7990, which comes with a clock speed of 950 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		171 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 204 Watts (119%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7990 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 464112 (415%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be much (about 486%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 201728 (486%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be quite a bit (about 277%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 44672 (277%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.